A Review of Machine Learning Applications in Land Surface Modeling

Abstract

Machine learning (ML), as an artificial intelligence tool, has acquired significant progress in data-driven research in Earth sciences. Land Surface Models (LSMs) are important components of the climate models, which help to capture the water, energy, and momentum exchange between the land surface and the atmosphere, providing lower boundary conditions to the atmospheric models. The objectives of this review paper are to highlight the areas of improvement in land modeling using ML and discuss the crucial ML techniques in detail. Literature searches were conducted using the relevant key words to obtain an extensive list of articles. The bibliographic lists of these articles were also considered. To date, ML-based techniques have been able to upgrade the performance of LSMs and reduce uncertainties by improving evapotranspiration and heat fluxes estimation, parameter optimization, better crop yield prediction, and model benchmarking. Widely used ML techniques used for these purposes include Artificial Neural Networks and Random Forests. We conclude that further improvements in land modeling are possible in terms of high-resolution data preparation, parameter calibration, uncertainty reduction, efficient model performance, and data assimilation using ML. In addition to the traditional techniques, convolutional neural networks, long short-term memory, and other deep learning methods can be implemented.